A Practical KYC Vendor Due Diligence Scorecard for Accuracy, Uptime, and Support

Choosing a KYC provider can feel like hiring a security guard for your storefront. If they’re polite but miss half the shoplifters, you still lose money. If they’re overzealous and stop every customer at the door, you lose sales. That tension is why KYC vendor due diligence needs more than a sales demo and a glossy PDF.

This practical scorecard is built for founders, operators, and growth teams who want measurable checks for accuracy, uptime, and support, especially if you’re launching regulated or fraud-prone business ideas like fintech apps, marketplaces, crypto onramps, payroll platforms, or subscription services.

Why KYC vendor due diligence breaks in real life

Most teams don’t fail because they “ignored compliance.” They fail because they evaluated the wrong things.

Common pitfalls look like this:

• You test on a small, clean sample, then accuracy collapses on edge cases (low-light selfies, older IDs, name variations).
• You only ask about uptime, not latency under load, so onboarding slows down at your busiest hour.
• Support seems fine until you hit an incident and learn you only get email responses in one time zone.
• You trust generic benchmarks instead of running a proof-of-concept with your own funnel data.

In late 2025, many buyers are also shifting toward ongoing monitoring (often called perpetual KYC or pKYC), which raises the bar on reliability and operational support because checks aren’t “one and done.” You’re running them continuously, and small failures add up fast.

The practical scorecard: three pillars that actually predict outcomes

A simple weighting that works for many SMBs and startups:

• Accuracy (40%): Less manual review, fewer chargebacks, fewer angry customers.
• Uptime and latency (35%): Onboarding throughput and conversion rate protection.
• Support (25%): How quickly you recover when something goes wrong.

If you want a broader vendor checklist for feature comparisons, ComplyCube’s KYC platform evaluation guide is a useful reference point: KYC platform comparison checklist.

Accuracy: test what “good” looks like in your funnel

Accuracy isn’t a single number. It’s a mix of outcomes that affect cost, fraud, and customer experience.

What to score and how to validate it:

False positives (legit users flagged): Ask for your expected manual review rate by country and document type. Then test it. False positives are stealth taxes because they create tickets, agent time, and churn.

False negatives (bad actors approved): Harder to measure, but you can simulate with known “bad” samples from fraud cases, chargebacks, or synthetic test sets.

Match quality and data freshness: If the vendor uses watchlist and screening data, ask how often sources update and how they handle name transliterations and aliases.

Edge-case performance: Your growth markets matter. A vendor that’s great in the US may be weaker with certain ID formats or address standards elsewhere.

If you want a feel for how analysts structure KYC solution scoring, this excerpted report can give context on typical evaluation dimensions (even if you don’t adopt their framework): Javelin KYC Solution Scorecard excerpt.

Uptime and latency: “99.9%” is not the whole story

A KYC API can be “up” and still hurt conversion if it’s slow, flaky, or inconsistent during traffic spikes.

Score these areas:

SLA and historical uptime: Don’t accept promises alone. Request uptime history, incident summaries, and maintenance windows.

Latency (p50 and p95): Median response time looks nice. Tail latency is what ruins checkouts. Ask for performance under load and rate limits.

Error handling: What happens when a check times out, a document upload fails, or a third-party data source is unavailable? You want a clear retry strategy and fallback flow.

Resilience and redundancy: Multi-region routing and clear disaster recovery plans matter more when you scale or run pKYC.

If you need a general vendor due diligence lens beyond KYC, SecurityScorecard’s overview is a solid starting point for what “good” looks like in third-party risk: vendor due diligence best practices.

Support: measure it like an emergency service, not a help desk

Support is easy to ignore until you’re staring at a stuck onboarding queue and a rising fraud alert.

Score support with operational questions:

Response time by severity: You need different targets for “how do I integrate this?” versus “production is down.”

Escalation path: Who can page engineering? Is there a dedicated Slack channel, on-call rotation, or only email?

Onboarding quality: Strong vendors provide test environments, sample payloads, and implementation guidance that reduces integration mistakes.

Post-incident behavior: Do you get a postmortem, root cause, and prevention plan, or a vague apology?

If your KYC checks connect to billing, payments, or subscriptions, also keep an eye on adjacent compliance responsibilities. This explainer can help you think through payment vendor obligations: Stripe PCI compliance overview.

A simple KYC vendor due diligence scorecard you can reuse

Use a 1 to 5 scale (1 = unacceptable, 3 = workable, 5 = strong). Multiply by weight.

Pillar	What to score	Evidence to request	Weight
Accuracy	False positives and manual review rate	POC results by country, doc type, edge cases	0.40
Accuracy	False negatives and fraud catch rate	Back-testing on known bad samples, audit trail detail	0.40
Uptime	Availability and incident rate	SLA draft, 12-month uptime history, incident summaries	0.35
Uptime	Latency under load (p95)	Load test results, rate limits, retry guidance	0.35
Support	Severity-based response and escalation	Support SLA, escalation chart, hours and channels	0.25

Keep the scorecard short on purpose. Add “nice-to-haves” (coverage, KYB, pricing model) after you’ve validated the pillars. That’s how you avoid being sold features you won’t use.

Run a proof-of-concept that exposes the truth fast

A POC should feel like a fire drill, not a product tour.

A practical approach:

1. Define your “bad outcomes” (fraud loss, blocked good users, slow onboarding).
2. Test with representative data (countries, devices, lighting, name formats).
3. Measure operational cost, including manual review time and ticket volume.
4. Replay peak traffic, even if simulated.
5. Review the audit trail, screenshots, timestamps, and decision reasons.

If you’re integrating KYC into a broader stack (CRM, onboarding, ticketing, data warehouse), these integration basics will reduce surprises during implementation: SaaS integration best practices guide.

Contract terms that protect you (even if the vendor is “great”)

Once the scorecard points to a winner, lock the outcome into the agreement:

• Accuracy commitments: not just “best effort,” but targets tied to your POC, plus review rights.
• Uptime and latency SLAs: include credits, clear definitions, and maintenance notice periods.
• Support SLAs by severity: response and resolution targets, plus escalation contacts.
• Audit and logging: retention, access, and evidence needed for regulators and disputes.
• Ongoing monitoring: monthly scorecard reviews, and triggers for remediation if metrics degrade.

If you’re exploring how AI changes KYC workflows (and what that means for explainability and audit trails), Thoughtworks offers useful context: generative AI for KYC processes.

Make the decision boring, measurable, and repeatable

The best vendor choice is the one you can explain in a sentence and defend with data. A practical KYC vendor due diligence scorecard keeps you honest by scoring what hurts most when it fails: accuracy, uptime, and support.

Build the scorecard, run a real POC, then bake the metrics into your contract. Your future self will thank you when onboarding scales, incidents happen, and your risk team asks, “Why did we choose them?” The answer should be measured, not guessed.